Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following decades. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly). 
 
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré.

Len Deighton

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Donald Barthelme

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'I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far.' 
 
Donald Barthelme is a puckish player with language, a writer of short but endlessly rewarding comic gems, a thinker and an experimenter. In these nine short stories, whether writing about a hairy, donkeyish king or a touching, private gesture of city-sized proportions, his is a surreal, deadpan genius. 
 
This book includes Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, The Glass Mountain, I Bought a Little City, The Palace at Four A.M., Chablis, The School, Margins, Game and The Balloon.

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

Frank O'Connor

'Father,' I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in a good humour, 'I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother.' 
 
Praised as Ireland's Chekhov, Frank O'Connor was a modern master of the short story. From an amateur brass band divided by partisanship to English soldiers who befriend their Irish captors, and from a child's comic confession to the end of a small-town friendship, these four humorous and tragic stories refract universal truths through the prism of 20th-century Ireland. 
 
This book contains The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland, Guests of the Nation, A Story by Maupassant, and First Confession.

The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant précis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. 
 
Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in1985, of a brain hemorrhage.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Vladimir Nabokov

'The woods were gradually thinning. I was tormented by strange hallucinations.I gazed at the weird tree trunks, around some of which were coiled thick, flesh-coloured snakes; suddenly I thought I saw, between the trunks, as though through my fingers, the mirror of a half-open wardrobe...' 
 
These three stories of menace, magic and melancholy display Vladimir Nabokov's astonishing range and inventiveness. Whether describing an escape across a surreal tropical landscape, a fateful meeting or an unexpected - and threatening - return, each tale shows his dazzling sleight of hand, intellectual playfulness and fantastical imagination. 
 
This book includes Terra Incognita, Spring in Fialta and The Doorbell.

Terra Incognita

Primo Levi

'He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating power of his evil eye...' 
 
Profound and compassionate, Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing literary voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Whether describing the most beautiful poem ever composed or an invention gone horribly wrong, these eight exquisitely wrought stories open up a rich, fantastical world of wonder, adventure and cruel twists of fate, where nothing is as it seems. 
 
This book contains The Magic Paint, The Death of Marinese, Censorship in Bitinia, Knall, Gladiators, The Fugitive, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Buffet Dinner

The Magic Paint

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Born an old man, Benjamin Button lived a very curious life, backwards 
 
When Benjamin Button's father arrives at hospital he is surprised and ashamed to find his new baby boy is a weathered, aged man, for all appearances no younger than seventy years old. As time goes by, young Benjamin comes to no longer require a cane, his hair ceases to be grey, his limbs become less frail, his wrinkles less deep, but still the world around him fails to come to terms with his oddness, as he ages towards infancy and beyond ... 
 
This remarkable, imaginative tale is here accompanied by a story of the desperate measures required by limitless wealth, and another about the lengths (and cuts) a girl is willing to go to for popularity. 
 
Includes A Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Bernice Bobs Her Hair.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

And Two Other Stories

Evelyn Waugh

Composed between 1939-62, the late stories of Evelyn Waugh are in turn blackly comic and bitingly satirical. In 'The Sympathetic Passenger' a radio-loathing retiree picks up exactly the wrong hitchhiker, while 'Charles Ryder's Schooldays' provides a hilarious and fragmentary insight into life before Brideshead. These witty and immaculately crafted stories display the finest writing of a master of satire and comic twists.

Tactical Exercise & Other Late Stories

John Updike

Collected with a dozen wonderful stories, all set in classic Updike territory, the short novel 'RABBIT REMEMBERED' is a major work in its own right - a riveting return to Updike's most celebrated fictional world. Janice and Nelson Angstrom, plus several other survivors of the irreducible Rabbit, fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness over the edge of the millennium, as a number of old strands come together in entirely unexpected ways.

Licks of Love

Short Stories And a Sequel, 'Rabbit Remembered'

Franz Kafka

Drawing directly on original manuscripts, this collection comprises the major short stories published after Kafka&rsquo;s death. It includes The Great Wall of China, Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor, Investigations of a Dog and his great sequences of aphorisms, with fables and parables on subjects ranging from the legend of Prometheus to the Tower of Babel. Allegorical, disturbing and possessing a dream-like clarity, these writings are quintessential Kafka.

The Great Wall of China

'The condemned man looked so doggishly submissive, it really seemed as if one might allow him to roam the slopes freely, and only needed to whistle when it was time for the execution, and he would come.' 
 
Kafka transformed the possibilities of the short story, his unique imagination giving his dark tales a sense of dream-like logic and unreality, in which their horrors are humorous and unease pervades. In these two stories, a traveller is shown the workings of an elaborate machine with a bloody purpose, and a son awakens unimagined resentments in his father. 
 
This book includes In the Penal Colony and The Judgement.

In the Penal Colony

Robert Musil

'They no longer hold themselves up with all their might, but sink a little and at that moment appear totally human' 
 
Of the very first rank of prose stylists, Robert Musil captures a scene's every telling detail and symbolic aspect with a precise and remarkable beauty. In these nine stories and essays, he considers holidaymakers and stone monuments, tales of war and blackbirds, and the great pathos of a tiny death: a fly's impossible fight against the grip of flypaper. 
 
This book includes Flypaper, Monkey Island, Fisherman on the Baltic, Sheep, As Seen in Another Light, Sarcophagus Cover, Monuments, The Paint Spreader, It's Lovely Here and The Blackbird.

Flypaper

'The inspector ordered that the bird be searched.One of the agents stalled saying it made him feel sick, and after some fierce pecking another withdrew sucking a bleeding finger.' 
 
In these two stories from an inventive, comic master of the form, old friends and friendly rivals Pietro and Tommasso discover a treasure lost by the side of the road, and become suspected of a using a blameless chicken for devious ends. Italo Calvino's writing explores the fringes of these small, unusual scenes and finds incalculable wisdom and humour there. 
 
This book contains The Queen's Necklace and The Workshop Hen.

The Queen's Necklace

Saki

'Three weeks later the world was advised of the coming of a new breakfast food, heralded under the resounding name of 'Filboid Studge'' 
 
H.H. Munro, better known by his pen name, Saki, wrote wickedly comic satires of upper-class Edwardian life. These seven short stories are macabre and extremely funny: they include a cat that is regrettably taught to speak, a vicious pet ferret worshipped as a god, a businessman triumphantly selling an unpalatable breakfast mush, and many dark twists and barbs. 
 
This book includes Filboid Studge, a Story of a Mouse That Helped, Todermory, Mrs. Packletide's Tiger, Sredni Vashtar, The Music on the Hill, The Recessional and The Cobweb.

Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped

Isak Dinesen

These five rich, witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her most well known tales, &lsquo;Babette&rsquo;s Feast&rsquo;, which was made into the classic film. It tells the story of a French cook working in a puritanical Norwegian community, who treats her employers to the decadent feast of a lifetime. There is also a real-life Prospero and his Ariel in &lsquo;Tempests&rsquo;, a mysterious pearl-fisher in &lsquo;The Diver&rsquo; and a brief, tragic encounter in &lsquo;The Ring&rsquo;. All the stories have a mystic, fairy-tale quality, linked by themes of angels, the sea, dreams and fate. They were among the last to be written by Isak Dinesen, and show her as a master of short fiction.

Anecdotes of Destiny

Margaret Drabble

'Her feelings for the child redeemed her from bitterness, and shed some light on the dark industrial terraces and the waste lands of the city's rubble.' 
 
One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, Margaret Drabble is an unmatched observer of postwar English lives, portraying social change, sexual liberation, landscape, class and the messy complications of human relationships with intricacy and honesty. In these two stories of lives colliding, a mother buying a birthday gift has her dreams destroyed, and a honeymoon leads to an unexpected epiphany. 
 
This book contains The Gifts of War and Hassan's Tower.

The Gifts of War

Robert Coover

'Paul stepped off the curb and got hit by a truck. He didn't know what it was that hit him at first, but now, here on his back, under the truck, there could be no doubt.' 
 
One of 50 original and exciting books of short stories, publishing in February to celebrate half a century of Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
This book contains Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady, The Babysitter, and A Pedestrian Accident.

Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady

6 of the Roaring Twenties chronicler&rsquo;s most scintillating short stories, chosen from Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). This inexpensive volume comprises &quot;The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,&quot; &quot;The Ice Palace,&quot; &quot;Bernice Bobs Her Hair,&quot; &quot;May Day,&quot; &quot;The Jelly-Bean,&quot; and &quot;The Offshore Pirate.&quot;

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz And Other Stories

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz; Bernice Bobs Her Hair; the Ice Palace; May Day; the Bowl

William Trevor

"It's like gadgets in shops.You buy a gadget and you develop an affection for it... but all of a sudden there are newer and better gadgets in the shops.More up-to-date models." 
 
William Trevor has been acclaimed as the greatest contemporary writer of short stories in the English language, likened to Chekhov for his insights into human nature. These three tales of obsession, heartbreak, silent sorrow and the small tragedies of ordinary lives are profound, immaculate and beautiful. 
 
This book includes The Mark-2 Wife, The Time of Year and Cheating at Canasta.

The Mark-2 Wife

Paul Bowles

'And then one day a solitary figure appeared, moving toward them across the lifeless plain from the west.One man on a camel... ' 
 
Paul Bowles's unforgettable short stories portray people facing hostile environments and the innate savagery of humanity. These three unbearably tense tales from sun-drenched and brutal climes tell of vengeance, abandonment, violence and cruelty enjoyed and suffered, in a surreal realm of horror. 
 
This book includes The Delicate Prey, A Distant Episode and The Circular Ruins.

The Delicate Prey

'But it hadn't been given for nothing. It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that he would now always remember' 
 
F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories defined the 1920s 'Jazz Age' generation, with their glittering dreams and tarnished hopes. In these three tales of a fragile recovery, a cut-glass bowl and a life lost, Fitzgerald portrays, in exquisite prose and with deep human sympathy, the idealism of youth and the ravages of success. 
 
This book includes Babylon Revisited, The Cut-Glass Bowl and The Lost Decade.

Babylon Revisited

Shirley Jackson

'Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle...' 
 
 
The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these five tales of casual cruelty by a master of the short story. Portraying insanity, disturbing encounters, troubling children and a sinister lottery, Shirley Jackson's work has an unmatched power to unnerve and unsettle. 
 
This book includes The Tooth, The Witch, Charles, The Lottery and The Intoxicated.

The Tooth

M. R. James

'The lower jaw was thin - what can I call it? - shallow, like a beast's; teeth showed behind the black lips...' 
 
M. R. James is the master of the English ghost story, whose tales are inhabited not by ethereal spirits, but by terrifying, palpable forces of evil. In these four stories figures appear in paintings, demonic voices are heard, books awaken ancient horrors - and ordinary objects and situations are transformed into inescapable nightmares. 
 
This book includes Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book, The Mezzotint, The Rose Garden and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral.

Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

'There once lived a woman who was so fat, she couldn't fit in a taxi, and when going into the subway she took up the whole width of the escalator' 
 
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been acclaimed as one of Russia's greatest living writers. These five dreamlike and blackly comic stories, two of which are here in English for the first time, tell of lost children, midnight forests, strange transformations, cruel curses, grief and resilience, in the darkest of modern fairy tales. 
 
This book contains Through the Wall and Anna and Maria.

Through the Wall

Virginia Woolf

'People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.' 
 
'If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand - the imagination.' 
 
Virginia Woolf's writing tested the boundaries of modern fiction, exploring the depths of human consciousness and creating a new language of sensation and thought. Sometimes impressionistic, sometimes experimental, sometimes brutally cruel, sometimes surprisingly warm and funny, these five stories describe love lost, friendships formed and lives questioned. 
 
This book includes The Lady in the Looking Glass, A Society, The Mark on the Wall, Solid Objects and Lappin and Lapinova.

The Lady in the Looking Glass

Angela Carter

'Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.' 
 
Angela Carter's playful and subversive retellings of Charles Perrault's classic fairy tales conjure up a world of resourceful women, black-hearted villains, wily animals and incredible transformations. In these seven stories, bristling with frank, earthy humour and gothic imagination, nothing is as it seems. 
 
This book includes Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, Cinderella: or, The Glass Slipper, Ricky with the Tuft and The Foolish Wishes.

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